


A Time to Build Up

by umadoshi (Ysabet)



Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant
Genre: Adopted Sibling Incest, F/M, Post-Canon, Series Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 22:32:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ysabet/pseuds/umadoshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Building a new life from the ashes of the old, one season at a time.</p><p>(Full-series spoilers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Time to Build Up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [walkthegale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkthegale/gifts).



> This treat is set post-series and has _all the spoilers_.
> 
> Post-reveal note: beta work by wildpear.

George was drenched to the skin when she came in, and she was smiling--not a combination I saw very often. She unlaced her boots and kicked them off, sluicing water off her face. "Are you busy?"

"Nope." I set the schematics I'd been looking at aside.

"Liar." The bag she'd been carrying hit the floor. Her gun, appropriately, got gentler treatment, as she reflexively checked the safety and set it on the table by the door.

"Well, not _very_ busy."

"Help me get undressed." She came right to me, pulling her shirt off over her head and tossing it on the back of a chair.

"Hello to you too," I said, grabbing her hips when she got in range. "You're in a good mood."

She leaned forward, close enough that I could smell the rain and the heat of her body, and gave me a second to appreciate the view of her cleavage before she kissed me. I hooked my fingers into the waist of her jeans and pulled her even closer. It unbalanced her enough that she grabbed for the arms of my chair, bracing herself while I ran the back of my hand across the soft skin of her belly, hip to hip. "Your jeans are soaked," I said.

"Why do you think I want help getting them off?" She bit my lower lip, not hard. "Come on."

I unzipped the jeans and got my hands back on her hips to begin peeling the wet denim off her. It stuck to her skin, so I tugged and she shimmied a little. By the time she let go of the chair to tug the jeans off where they were clinging wetly to her ankles, my gun schematics were long since out of my head.

"What's got you all smiley?" I asked.

George kissed me again before she answered. I opened my mouth for her, letting her take the kiss deep, and responded in kind. "I don't know," she said, straightening up once she was sure we were on the same page. "It started raining, but the sun stayed out. Everything was glittering."

 _Everything was **bright** ,_ I knew she meant. It had taken her months to start truly adjusting-- _letting_ herself adjust--to what normal vision entailed, especially outdoors. At home she liked sunlight coming through the windows, but at home she could also draw the curtains whenever she wanted, or even shut herself in the bedroom, where we had both white and black lights so she could choose the safe dimness of UV if she needed it to relax.

Our first real season in Quebec had been autumn, and the truth was we'd both been too traumatized to pay much attention to it. Every scrap of energy that we didn't need to devote to settling in, to establishing our cover, was spent trying to deal with everything that had happened to us. Autumn had been nightmares and hours-long conversations and the dead girl in my head going quiet for longer periods of time. Each silence made it that much worse when the whispers resumed, my carefully-nurtured insanity trying to preserve itself at the cost of everything else.

Autumn had been George laughing while she kissed me, laughing because even false humor could be a refuge. "You know, it's a good thing you're my brother," she said, when what she meant was _Maybe this would have destroyed **us** if we weren't family first_. It had been rediscovering how good it felt to fight with her, and rediscovering what we knew for the first twelve years of our lives: it's harder to storm into different rooms effectively when you share a bedroom. So we fought, and alternated which of us retreated into the bedroom and which into the office, and that made us both laugh a little even when we were still steaming mad.

Once winter came she'd spent most of it hiding inside from the cold, and when she went outdoors after it snowed the light glinting off the snow was so bright it hurt everyone's eyes, not just hers. She retreated from it because that was what she knew; where just about everybody else squinted and coped, George went back behind sunglasses and looked at the world outside like it was a trap.

The fact that winter meant the world outside was _white_ , intensely so, didn't help. It wasn't antiseptic and sterile the way a CDC facility was, but all that meant was that it didn't trigger panic attacks. She still didn't like it one bit, and then she was furious at herself for letting it get to her, because _Georgia Mason_ would never have reacted that way.

She was right. Georgia Mason--the woman who'd died almost two years earlier--wouldn't have reacted that way. Of course, she also never spent weeks locked in a white-walled cage, being treated as a disposable lab experiment. She was never subjected to experiences that were designed to degrade and psychologically destroy her. Funny how being tortured changes a person in all kinds of ways, and how some of those ways can't be undone.

So spring had been a relief for both of us, whiteness melting into color. In spring George had forced herself outside with her face bare, still instinctively ducking away from full sun, but gritting her teeth and edging closer. The light had been softer then, helping her ease into it.

And now it was early summer, and already hotter than we'd ever expected Canada could _be_ \--we were west-coast American kids, born and raised, and while we knew what it was like to roll our eyes at startled visitors to the Bay Area when they discovered the hard way that our weather wasn't the stereotypical Californian heat and sun, we'd both bought into "what everyone knew" about Canadian weather. Dr. Abbey had laughed her ass off at the mere mention of "Canadian weather", and pulled out a map and told us to come back when we'd clued in that it was a fucking huge country we were looking to get lost in.

It was hot, and the sun was ferociously bright, and the two combined to make sidewalks glow and shimmer. George still took sunglasses with her everywhere, but more and more she'd been leaving them unused, staring around her at the light that was literally like nothing she'd ever seen before. It would've seared her retinas to crisps if she still had her reservoir condition.

She was practically giddy over it now, smiling in a way I'd rarely seen even when we were kids. She was also warm and excited and, not incidentally, mostly naked in front of me, her skin damp with a mixture of rain and sweat and arousal that went straight to my head. And other parts. I slid my hands from her hips to her ass, pulling her right against me.

"If I had to guess, I'd think you had plans for me or something," I said.

"Detailed plans." She nodded, wide-eyed and attempting solemnity. "It was a long walk home. I had time to think about it."

That was still a scary thought: a long walk home was something we'd been raised to be very, very cautious about, especially if you were alone. But she'd had her gun, and our town was keen on patrols and less so on blood tests every five feet, and it was still on the map, so it seemed to be working. That didn't keep my chest from tightening with fear every time she left without me, or from feeling a rush of relief every time she walked in the door.

She had to leave without me for both our sakes. Total seclusion was a bandage, and sooner or later bandages have to come off, no matter how long you've spent with them being all that holds you together.

I smiled up at her. "And what kinds of things were you thinking, hmm?"

"Good things." George kissed the top of my head and worked her fingers into my hair, tipping my head back. "You'll like them."

Sometimes we talked about our town and our place in it. Sure, our new lives were a shell, but was it just a place for us to cower from the world, or would we be like those tiny crabs that leave one shell for another and make it a new home? But other times I didn't care about that, and this was one of them. George was smiling back at me, eyes alight, and if there was anything else in the world that mattered, I didn't want to know about it. "I just bet I will," I replied. "I always like the way you think."

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Ecclesiastes, or if you prefer, from the song "Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is a Season)", which for simplicity we'll say is by The Byrds. :)


End file.
